Hei is always more talkative when they’ve had sex. It’s almost cliché. It suits him, though, so she never comments on it; the best way to stop him from acting like a person is by pointing out when he’s showing himself especially human and make him feel self-conscious about it.

She says nothing. She has half a mind to let the low murmur of his voice lull her to sleep.

"Amber?" he asks when she’s halfway there. His thumb runs along the lock of long, pale green hair he’s wound around his fingers in lieu of touching her. "Light up for me?"

She doesn’t open her eyes. "Why?"

"Because I dropped something and it’s too dark to see," he deadpans.

"Oh, well, if it’s for a good cause," she responds in kind, and turns on her side, away from him. The lock of hair pulls taut for a moment before he lets go.

Silence answers her. Amber lets her muscles relax and her mind drift. Long moments later, he shifts and brushes her hair away from her neck, letting the backs of his fingers caress down her shoulder.

"Because you look pretty when you’re glowing," he whispers.

She turns back around for that and tells him: "I’m already glowing."

His brows furrow in confusion.

She waggles her eyebrows. "With the afterglow."

"I don’t know that word."

Well, there goes that joke.

"I’m sure Chinese has a similar concept. Look it up in the dictionary some time."

"You can’t just tell me?" he says with a hint of irritation.

Smiling, she climbs on top of him, straddling his waist and letting the blanket fall away from her naked body. "One favour at a time."

And she calls on her power.

Time becomes tangible – its contents unspool in every direction, like cobwebs clinging to her mind, trembling with a thousand sources of information for every second that passes and every choice she makes – and a soft blue aura of synchrotron radiation emits from her body. It illuminates Hei, too, and brings out the deep, dark blue of his eyes.

Physically, there is nothing that differentiates a Contractor from an ordinary human. No abnormalities of the body, no changes to the brain. And yet. Somehow, the Gates and the false stars have a hold on them anyway, from the depths of their souls to the molecules that make up their cells.

Hei doesn’t look at Amber like he thinks she’s pretty when she glows. He looks at her the way he does whenever she appears like a lightning strike to warn him and Pai away from certain death. Like he’s trying to convince his fickle human brain to associate synchrotron radiation with something good, like sex and a saviour, rather than blood and killing and a new human-faced horror lurking behind every tree.

Something sad tickles at the edges of Amber’s subconscious. Then the look passes, and he lets his eyes roam up and down every inch of her body with open and straightforward appreciation. She shakes her hair away from her breasts and rubs her thumbs in soothing little circles across his ribs.

"I wonder if it gives you cancer," he remarks idly, letting his hands wander up her thighs.

"No. That was one of the first things the scientists tested for."

"They could be lying."

"They’d be wearing a lot more protective clothing around us if they were."

"I suppose," he allows. He reaches up. She folds into his embrace, stretching out atop his firm chest as his arms come around her. The first stirrings of renewed interest twitch against her buttocks. "What does it feel like to you, when you’re in it? Or emitting it, I mean."

"The light? It doesn’t feel like anything."

"Really? Pai said a Contract activating feels the way lemon juice tastes."

Huh. Interesting. "Different powers come with different perceptions. I’m not in the electricity business, so I don’t have a sixth sense for electromagnetic radiation. But let’s not talk physics right now."

Leaning up on her hands, she arches her back and tilts her hips, rubbing back against him and making him gasp. The invitation is clear, so he cups her breasts and squeezes. He kisses them, every inch of those soft handfuls, and then the skin above it too, chest, clavicle, throat, jaw.

"Don’t let go of the light, okay?" he murmurs in her ear.

"Wasn’t planning on it."

Like this, held poised and ready without using it, the power in her grasp costs her nothing, and all she has to do to keep it active is try. She rolls to the side and pulls him up and over her, inside of her; and she pulls the sheets up and over them both, covering their heads and blocking out the rest of the world; and she doesn’t let him leave her little cocoon of unearthly light until she’s made him love it enough to come, and those dear, deadly hands between her legs shatter her concentration and snuff her out like so many others before.